Posted
by
CmdrTaco
on Tuesday September 16, 2003 @12:35PM
from the you-have-a-right-to-remain-gorgeous dept.

ThinkGeek has opened up their Slashdot Store, which among other fineries, is selling the all new Slashdot T-Shirts. We also have a surprise: In addition to the 3 winners we announced previously, by popular request, we added a 4th winner to the roster: Dan Sandler's 'Soothing Green Light' design. So go, buy all 4! And a hat! Do it! Also, Scott Lewallen made Icons & Wallpapers based on his Volatile Hyper Linkage design.

That the dot.com boom and bust has come and gone, you still need REAL MONEY to pay for things geeks like such as computers and internet access and that in order to make money you need a better business plan then "Lets just give away the fruits of our labor and hope our product sucks badly enough that our customers will need to hire a lot of support services from us!"

What I do have a problem with is the "Submit t-shirt suggestions which will then be our property." It just violates what the Slashdot seems to be about. Information wants to be free and what-not. They could've made the shirts, and still kept the logos open-source if someone else wanted to go around printing their own shirts (which I doubt too many would).

I hear what you are saying but Slashdot or OSDN isn't overflowing with money. Everything they do has to make financial sense. The money from these shirts will probably help make Slashdot self-sufficient without needing to be subsidized by the rest of the OSDN. It would be hard to garuntee that revenue if someone else could make the shirts.

Whats more important, Slashdot surviving or adhering to a saying that isn't even true? Information isn't alive, it can't "want" anything.

People subscribe to slashdot, and dont get any real benefits (you can block ads in mozilla anyway, and seeing another dupe 20 minutes before the rest of the public?). Why do I spend 10 bucks on a tshirt when matalan have 5 for five pounds? Because I prefer to support slashdot. Why buy "fair trade" coffee over nescafe? Because you care were your money goes.

The people buying slashdot tshirts will buy the official ones. In the worst case, simply have a trademark (the slashdot image should be a trademark) on the tshirt. Remember trademarks are for consumer protection, so you know you get the real thing.

What I do have a problem with is the "Submit t-shirt suggestions which will then be our property." It just violates what the Slashdot seems to be about. Information wants to be free and what-not. They could've made the shirts, and still kept the logos open-source if someone else wanted to go around printing their own shirts (which I doubt too many would).

So don't buy the t shirt then, no one is forcing you to. Maybe if they hadn't told the people who entered the competition that/. would own their design

I think it would be fitting if some entrepeneur ripped their copyrighted designs and sold their OWN shirts (they are charging quite a lot for them, considering they paid an absolute pittance for the design). After all, it's not like printing off t-shirts with the exact same design is depriving anyone else of physical property now, is it ? How would VA be hurt ?

Makes you wonder why/. saw fit to ensure they own the copyrights when it seems like the editors and many of their more vocal readers are always po

Only the most insane, irrational zealot would pooh-pooh/all/ forms of copyright. Of course images and designs deserve to be copyrighted - or does anyone find acceptable the ridiculous treatment Bill Watterson's creations have at the hands of profiteering tee-shirt makers?

The community at large has always been more concerned with fair use; you should be able to listen to a song as much as you like, or mod your xbox if you paid for it, and by that same token you should be allowed to display whatever you wan

Indeed. Laughed my ass off. It's a treat to see how strongly people feel about things. Exposing the cracks in character. I don't do it often either, but I do it differently. Every once in a while I strike gold.

But couldn't they have selected a shirt with a non-pretentious slogan? All of these are a little too much like "Can't live without Dasani". I mean "mainline geek culture" and "volatile hyperlinkage"? What's wrong with a plain white T-shirt with the slashdot logo and "News for Nerds, stuff that matters" on the back?

What's wrong with a plain white T-shirt with the slashdot logo and "News for Nerds, stuff that matters" on the back?

They used to have one, I got it. Has "Slashdot" with "news for nerds, stuff that matters" under it in small print. That is on the center of the front of the shirt, and on the back is a barcode, and under it, it reads "anonymous coward". I got mine through thinkgeek a few years ago, but I guess they abandoned that design. I got it because it was simple.

Will Cafepress allow you to put copyrighted material on a shirt, even if you're planning to be the only one buying it? They seem pretty strict on that point when uploading images.

Technically, yes you can put copyrighted material on a shirt. (anything you create is copyrighted):-) Oh... you mean you put unauthorized copyrighted stuff on a shirt? I think you probably can, but you shouldn't because it is illegal.

I have never done it, but I am guessing that they will. They can't really check everything

I noticed that the hypodermic needle design actually was changed to RJ-45; some were complaining that the RJ-11 design didn't make sense. Any respectable Slashdotter would have an Ethernet port installed, not a modem line!

What's the deal with T-1 lines anymore...for downloading, not really a big deal. On a cable modem I usually get equal speed on up to 1000kbps more. So you can run a server at a higher upload speed, but on the Internet, it is always better to receive than to give. And it's dirt-cheap in comparison.

Actually, ThinkGeek was slashdotted once, albeit a very long time ago (almost four years to be exact.) If your time machine ain't workin' or if archive.org just ain't your pleasure, here's the page seen on that fateful day, September 15th, 1999:

I just clicked on an article and was treated to a bunch of offensive pap and mindless, sophomoric "wordsmithing", that...
Wait, it's the article threads. My mistake. Easy to make on today's/., you must admit...

Except that the entire success and corpus of this website is from the "contributors", the thousands of people that dig up stories and post all these comments. Nobody comes to slashdot to read Malda's typos, bad grammar, and utter lack of editorial skill. Don't you think it's in poor taste to completely ignore that and proclaim "the website is where it is today because of Taco, and you get no say because you had nothing to do with it"?

Oh, and BTW, slashdot has nowhere close to 3/4 million members. Just b

during high school, the majority of us were trying to NOT get beat up by the jock, or try as much as possible to not be recognized as a geek. (the latter was foiled by our not-so-keen fashion sense)
now you want us to be a WALKING geek poster crowd?
uhh, OK(no, serious)

One could argue that the 4th added winner... the soothing green light design, is indeed the second best design, better than others there... and I think Thinkgeek agrees, what with their ordering of the t-shirts on display... in fact I agree completely with their ordering of them.

Sometimes one has to wonder about the design sense that the Cmdr Taco has...:)

I can't believe that these guys can do this! geez, have they no business morals? what next, Rob will post he is selling used cars on slashdot?

I don't think there is anything wrong with this. We were asked to vote for T-shirt designs and now we're being notified that the shirts are available for purchase. I, for one, would not have otherwise known had it not been posted.